Lois Masket Bloom was an American

developmental psychologist Developmental psychology is the science, scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult deve ...

and

Edward Lee Thorndike Edward Lee Thorndike ( – ) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to his " theory of connectionism" and helped la ...

Professor Emerita of Psychology and Education at

Teachers College, Columbia University Teachers College, Columbia University (TC) is the graduate school of education affiliated with Columbia University, a private research university in New York City. Founded in 1887, Teachers College has been a part of Columbia University since ...

. Her pioneering research elucidated the roles of cognition, emotion, and social behavior in

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...

. Bloom is the author of several books on language acquisition, including ''One Word At a Time: The Use of Single-Word Utterances Before Syntax','' the culmination of Bloom's first longitudinal study, and the first-ever published study of language acquisition to use video-recorded data. ''Language Development From Two To Three'' a collection of findings from research studies spanning two decades, highlights the tremendous achievements in language acquisition that occur during this period of childhood. For ''Language Development and Language Disorders','' which she co-wrote with Margaret Lahey, Bloom connected her research with her early experience as a speech therapist working with language-delayed children. It offers guidelines for speech therapists assessing and assisting children with language delays. ''The Transition From Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression'' was the inaugural winner of the Eleanor E. Maccoby Book Award from the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 170,000 members, including scientists, educators, clin ...

, Division 7, which recognizes the author of influential books in the field of developmental psychology.

Education

Bloom received her B.A. in 1956 from

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...

, where she is a distinguished alumna. Today, the Penn State Child Study Center holds annual Lois Bloom Lecture on child development, funded by gifts from Bloom and psychologist

. Bloom earned her M.A. at the University of Maryland in 1958, and her Ph.D. with distinction at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

in 1968. Her dissertation, Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars, was supervised by sociolinguist

William Labov William David Labov ( ; December4, 1927December17, 2024) was an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has ...

. Her research, involving

case studies A case study is an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real-world context. For example, case studies in medicine may focus on an individual patient or ailment; case studies in business might cover a particular fi ...

of the early utterances of three children, was highly influential in the field of language acquisition.

Awards

Bloom received the Distinguished Achievement Award by the New York City Speech-Hearing-Language Association in 1986, and received honors from the

American Speech–Language–Hearing Association The American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA) is a professional association for speech–language pathologists, audiologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists in the United States and internationally. The associatio ...

in 1992. She received the

G. Stanley Hall Granville Stanley Hall (February 1, 1844 – April 24, 1924) was an American psychologist and educator who earned the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States of America at Harvard University in the nineteenth century. His ...

Medal from the

for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psychology in 1997, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 2003.

Research

Bloom's research helped usher in a semantic revolution in the field of language acquisition. Linguist and philosopher

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

hypothesized a “

language acquisition device The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a ...

”—hard-wired structures in the brain dedicated to language acquisition—to account for the speed with which infants learn language. In contrast, Bloom's research, according to ''The New York Times'', "pioneered the new trend" of examining children's two-word utterances for semantic intent as well as word distribution. By focusing on the semantics of children's utterances, she demonstrated that language reflects how children make meaning out of their previously non-linguistic representations of knowledge. Throughout her career, Bloom remained focused on placing the child, and his or her environment, at the center of her research. In her keynote address at Boston University's 25th Conference on Language development, Bloom discussed her concern that advances in technology allowed researchers to study a child's utterances while ignoring the context in which the child produces that language. In ''The Intentionality Model and Language Acquisition'', she refers to the "authority of the child"—of central importance is the child's contents of mind, which he or she expresses through language and behavior. According to Bloom's theory, interaction with the world, and the feedback that results, drives development. The intentionality model Bloom developed with researcher Erin Tinker depicts language development as the result of engagement and effort. It takes work to acquire language, and engagement with one's environment motivates the child to do that work. Knowledge of language, according to this model, exists at the intersection of use, content, and form—all are necessary for language to develop. Based on her findings that highly emotional babies are slower to learn language, Bloom theorized that babies learn best when they are able to focus on the environment, rather than on their own feelings. Bloom contributed three longitudinal corpora to the CHILDES database. These files comprise the recordings and transcripts of three children's language development (Eric, Gia, and Peter) that Bloom collected for her dissertation.

Selected articles

* Bloom, L. (1975). Language development review. In F. Horowitz (Ed.) ''Review of child development research, Volume 4'' (pp. 245–303). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. *Bloom, L., Hood, L., & Lightbown, P. (1974). Imitation in language development: If, when and why. ''Cognitive Psychology, 6'', 380–420. *Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. ''Journal of Child Language'', ''7''(2), 235–261. *Bloom, L., Lightbown, P., & Hood, L. (1975). Structure and variation in child language. ''Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 40'' (2, Serial No. 160). *Bloom, L., Merkin, S., & Wootten, J. (1982). "Wh"-questions: Linguistic factors that contribute to the sequence of acquisition. ''Child Development, 53'' (4), 1084–1092. *Bloom, L. & Tinker, E. (2001). The intentionality model and language acquisition: Engagement, effort, and the essential tension in development. ''Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 66'' (4, Serial No. 267).

References

External links

Faculty page at Columbia University
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bloom, Lois American developmental psychologists American women psychologists 21st-century American psychologists Columbia University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Pennsylvania State University alumni American women academics 21st-century American women